First post of 2012! (Some pictures, a painting, and a recap.)

Your 2011 year in blogging:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.In 2011, there were 99 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 123 posts. There were 37 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 6mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.

Well thank you, everyone! I’ve recently begun getting a lot of hits on my black bean brownie recipe, too? Who would have thought!

I hope 2012 will be a productive year. In just a few weeks I’d have completed my bartonella treatment, hopefully. More on that once I actually get there, but I haven’t–to my knowledge–had any reliable exacerbations every five days. ;) My LLMD was impressed, and said one more month of treatment, to be sure.

Okay, so I’ve managed to post about life lessons, recipes, and articles lately, without any mention of how I’m actually doing… So symptom charting, right! I had a mini-flare (???) around the 16-23rd of December but it wasn’t too severe–the main symptom was excruitiating fatigue. For the past five days (about) I’ve had lots of what appear to be Lyme symptoms. This is pretty typical since I often have a Lyme flare up at the beginning of the month. The “fire foot”/”hot foot” sensation, in my left leg. The “dragging left leg” thing, yesterday. Numbness in my left leg, and today in my hands. Facial nerve disturbance (pictures I take of myself during this scare me a little!). Severe cognitive dysfunction. Joint pain, nasty headaches (but none today!), worse fatigue, minor palpitations, internal tremor, eyes going every-which-way, seeing things, temperature of 99.5, complete lack of appetite, needing ibuprofen every evening. I stopped having headaches for I think a week…then they were back. The past week I’ve also found several bruises–one on my ankle, one on my shin, one on the back of my arm, and another on the back of my elbow on the other arm. One actually appeared on a day I know I didn’t hit anything, so I’m assuming them to be sporadic. Anemia-related? It took me about a week to recover from Christmas, but it went very well–I took lots of rest breaks!

My new favourite thing to put my lemon juice in, is pineapple juice. Three ounces of pineapple juice (natural, not concentrate!), 1 or 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, and three ounces of sparkling water–detoxing never tasted so wonderful!

Also randomly: I’ve developed a new migraine trigger of…cheetos. Yes, cheetos. Apparently fake “cheese flavoring” is not something my brain likes. Nor is the sucralose (splenda) I found in my antacids, of all places!

Since my last ability scale checkpoint in October (which was right after I started Bactrim, but before the Lyme had a chance to hit me again) I have gone back down a bit. In general, I was thinking last week that.. as much as I hate to admit it, I think I’ve overestimated myself on the ability scales, out of genuine forgetfulness of what it’s like to be healthy.

I remember enough to know that I could go go go all day then sleep it off and be fine; that I could lift things all day and just be sore from it, not experience muscle paralysis; that I could think about a tedious problem (technology or math) and not get physically ill from the mental exertion; and that I could keep things in my short-term memory for more than a few seconds. For the most part, I forget that my level of improvement is completely relative, and that my 40% or 50% is completely different than someone else’s. Perhaps those who read my blog and happen to be less ill, or those who are healthy, don’t realize that, either. It might really become a problem if I were to tell someone in charge of determining my disability status what level I think I’m at, because 50% recovered to me, just means literally being able to take care of myself and my basic needs, like eating and bathing!

None the less, since my last checkpoint, I am for now at: 15% physical ability, 15% cognitive ability, and 40% symptom severity. As always, this is not constant: I have bad days that are worse and good days that are higher up on the scale. For instance, today I was up a lot more, and New Year’s Eve was also a better day, in which I stood up a lot and didn’t need much assistance. But in general, this is where I am. I need caffeine to take all my baths, and even then they are often an immense task, but I’m just so glad I still have those options!

I’d like to end this random post with some pictures I took on a day when I was bedbound, as well as one I took when I wasn’t! Also, a painting I did a couple of weeks ago, when my days were horrible but, for some reason, I felt better for an hour or two each night (probably from resting all day).

Clicking them will obviously enlarge them in the gallery, then if you want to read more about a particular picture (or comment), click on “permalink” and it will take you to the individual description page. Happy New Year, my fellow spoonies!